Hamlet, often lauded as William ShakespeareÆs greatest dramatic work, is not the simple revenge play that it at first seems to be. Unlike the tragedy of King Lear, or even the romantic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, there is no clear resolution to the playÆs action, no clear sense that the something that is rotten in the state has been plucked out. ShakespeareÆs other tragedies tend to follow a more purely classical pattern in which a character makes a terrible mistake because of some inbred flaw and has to pay for this mistake (such as LearÆs blinding pride and the tragedy that befalls him as a result). Even when the innocent die in ShakespeareÆs other plays û such as the deaths of Romeo and Juliet û there is still a sense that justice has in some way been served; the death of the lovers does seem to bring about an end to the feud.
But the world of Denmark as seen in HamletÆs court is so corrupted that it cannot be cleansed even by the degree of death that takes place in the play (Smith, 191, p. 29). By the end of the action Elsinore has been transformed into a garden of the dead, with the corpses of both the innocent and the culpable laid in the ground like terrible seeds. And there is the sense in the end that they will produce the same kind of fruit, that the decay will continue. This paper examines the incomplete state of Hamlet, the sense in the play that the death and horror will continue with the innocent as likely to suffer as the guilty. Some contrasts will be drawn to other Shakespearean tragedies to underscore the intentional ways in which the playwright left the action of Hamlet so essentially open-ended.
Hamlet (probably written in 1601) goes far beyond other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of horror; confirmed in this feeling by the murder of his father and the sensuality of his mother, he presents a pattern o...